Have you ever fostered a kitten or been caring for a cat that was just really stupid? Just absolutely fucking stupid. Like the stupidest cat

followthebluebell:

let me tell you about Kiki. 

When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit.  I didn’t sit still.  I didn’t want to read the letters.  I didn’t want to do anything except go home.  Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten.  A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street.  It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens.  tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.

My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals.  “It’s why she married me,” he always says.  Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.

This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff.  She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian.  No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer. 

I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there.   It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’.  There wasn’t even an upstairs.  There wasn’t even a ground floor.  There was just NOTHING going on in there. 

Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example.  She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs.  Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go.  One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.

Please don’t give her the credit.  It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.

TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either.  She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down.  Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string.  She was delighted and jumping and playing.  Just normal kitten stuff.  Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead.  I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.

The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture.  She forgot how to JUMP.  She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry.   She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle.  Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly.  No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.

She also never grew very much.  Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds.  She also had a serious dental issue.  Her canines stuck straight out horizontally.  They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.

I loved that dumb animal.  She was a very good girl and I miss her.

“Community, religion, national identity, and family” are basically the four tools used to oppress people throughout the entirety of history, so no, I do not have sympathy for men who are sad because they’ve lost the ability to wield these things like weapons against people. And I’m going to presume anyone who tries to bring that up as a gotcha is just playing political football, and does not actually care about the suffering of men.

lenyberry:

Gotcha it’s oppressive for men to be sad that they don’t have community connections or strong family ties and/or to suffer from crises of faith or being embarrassed about their country. It’s fine for women to be sad like that. But it’s oppressive if men do it. 

Look my dude, stuff can be simultaneously “a thing that some people use as clubs to beat other people with” AND “a thing that some people find personally valuable in their own life”. 

Or are you saying that it’s inherently oppressive to… be religious? To want a community and a family? To care about where you come from? These are BASIC HUMAN DRIVES. That’s… what makes them such effective weapons of oppression – people suffer immensely when stripped of them, and fear their loss strongly enough that “we’ll kick you out of our community and god will hate you and your family will disown you and we’ll tell you that you don’t belong here at all” is a very effective way of enforcing group conformity. It’s shitty, it’s abusive, but it works. 

So basically… your argument here kinda looks like “people withhold food from other people as a form of torture, so I don’t feel bad for men who are hungry because they don’t have enough food”. It’s a mean-spirited non-sequitur that completely misses the point of the post you’re referencing and instead jumps straight to the assumption that men are oppressors and that the only reason they’d even want social ties at all is so that they can have power over others. Which sounds a lot more like a political-football ‘gotcha’ attempt to me than “maybe we should allow men to have emotions about things”.

Denying people the right to their own thoughts and emotions is abusive. I don’t care who they are, they’re human fucking beings, and INDIVIDUAL human fucking beings thanks.

Are you forgetting that not all men are 50+ CEOS of multinational corporations and include your father, brothers, cousins, uncles….? Your friends from school? Your teachers…? People who are just living their lives the best they can and doing what they can to be decent human beings…? 

Yes there are shitty people in this world who wield things as weapons when they shouldn’t. SOME OF THEM ARE WOMEN. Do those women not get to be upset when those things are stripped from them too…?

I know plenty of people who are superficially those “auntie” lesbians, or the equivalent, and yet they are in face vastly transgressive when you consider the environment they exist in. Places in which being not straight at all is *still* considered beyond the pale; yes, places like that still exist, dammit. The fact that people are entirely willing to say those people aren’t “queer,” and thus cast them as dirty assimilationists, is why I will never trust that damn word.

lenyberry:

fierceawakening:

The thing about saying they aren’t queer though is that doing so is a response to “don’t use queer as an umbrella term.” That’s why i distrust anyone who says don’t say queer—because it forces people into weird pretzeling where “oh I only meant SUBVERSIVE PEOPLE” which has the exact problem you just laid out.

That is also one of the concerns I have with the thing making it something I cannot 100% endorse, that circumstances vary dramatically from time to time and place to place where the exact same couple doing the exact same things, in two different places and/or times, one might be seen as entirely average and unremarkable in any way, while the other is seen as EXTREMELY transgressive of the social norms. 

The White Suburban Middle-Class Gays in, say, San Diego area are probably not having the same experiences as those in the suburbs of Austin TX. Which is probably also a different environment than New York, which is a different environment than London. How much or how little daily homophobia the White Suburban Middle-Class Gays in each area have to deal with isn’t even gonna be the same from city to city, state to state, let alone country to country. 

There are countries where just being gay is still punishable by a death penalty, so in such a country openly living with a same-sex partner would be an act of enormous bravery and social transgression all on its own. While at the same time in some areas of the US and other more-progressive countries, it’s unusual if anyone does more than blink twice about two men moving in next door and kissing each other in their front yard every day.

ok maybe don’t attack OTHER PEOPLE for what someone else said….? jesus h christ *pinches nose and inhales* Ok. You have a decent point, but really… the way you’re going about it isn’t productive. Yes, there are still places wherein simply existing as a same-sex-attracted person is transgressive and/or cause for heightened self preservation instinct re: potential violence and oppression. Literally no one here is arguing that.

Also: Way to misrepresent WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID. Which was that I do not 100% endorse MY OWN OPINION, and that I acknowledge there are issues with it… AND THEN ALSO that there’s a difference in experiences between those who just so happen to be LGBT and go on to live a fairly normal, non-involved existence wherein BEING LGBT isn’t a core part of their identity that they Must Activist About but just a fact of life. THAT is the difference I am making, nothing whatsoever to do about oppression, ONLY about how people choose to live their lives. 

There is, particularly to me, a difference between a White Republican Gay in the suburbs of a LGBT-neutral city who does nothing except live a very very “normal” vanilla life except oh yeah their partner is also their same gender… And the same person who lives for activism, marches, and community history wherein their attraction/relationships/etc are an intrinsic part of their identity. 

I’m not saying one is better than the other, and I’m not coming at this from a “Queerer Than Thou” mental space. I’m not all that heavily invested in spreading my opinion, just sharing how I, personally, classify things while acknowledging the inherent issues with that classification while ALSO acknowledging that I DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING BETTER, but I am WILLING TO LEARN ONE.

I didn’t say they don’t face oppression. I didn’t say that they shouldn’t feel free to use whatever label they deem appropriate. I didn’t say anything about them being “assimilationist” or whatever word you’d care to throw around. Neither did Leny nor Fierce, thanks. So maybe don’t spill shit in their inboxes over someone else’s opinion they’ve already acknowledged isn’t perfect…??

knitmeapony:

wrenb77:

sleephawhoneedsit:

rapid-artwork:

Movie Pitch

A strict all girls boarding school is across a river from a strict all boys boarding school.

Boys and girls are forbidden from fraternizing, but they find sneaky ways to form friendships and even date. I assume there is heavily monitored internet and phones are for emergencies only so they have to resort to more unconventional methods of communication. (Messages in bottles, a system of mirrors, writing on chalkboards and putting them in the windows ect.ect.)

Until one day a shy boy at the boys boarding school tells his best friend (and the leader of a resident well meaning boys gang) that he actually feels more like a girl.

The gang leader contacts the leader of a girl gang across the river and they begin to plan an overly elobrate heist to smuggle the shy trans girl across the river in exchange for a chill tomboy and the two will assume each other’s lives until they graduate.

Hijinks ensue as they pull a ‘Great-Esacpe’ style mission to avoid detection from the overly strict headmasters and an overly passionate team of campus security guards.

Friendships are tested, there is lots of home-alone style logic to outsmart the adults, and there is romantic tension between the leaders of the gangs as they put aside their differences to help their two friends find a place to be themselves. It is light-hearted in tone but is also over the top and everyone plays it way too serious to the point of comedy. The two kids swapping places have classic “parent trap” style hijinks pretending to be the other person and avoid detection.

Think “kids next door” + “recess” but shot like a heist movie.

Add a funny character actor as a dopey but well meaning janitor and you got a stew going.

As a parent of two young impressionable children I 100% would take them to see this movie.

I would take my kids to this in a heartbeat!

Add in the idea that you never see the headmistress of the girls school or the headmaster of the boys school until the very end. Sure you see teachers and administrators and even the vice principal or whatever but you never see the person actually in charge of each school.

Then in a during the credits / post credits scene as the kids are celebrating cut back to the headmistress and headmaster watching the entire thing over security cameras.

One of them hands the other a $20 bill, clearly paying off a bet.

“How long do you think this sort of thing has been going on?” asks the headmistress, who is played by a trans actress.

“How many years ago were we in school?” asks the headmaster, who is played by a trans actor.

“Should we tell them what we know?”

“No, no. Let them enjoy it.”

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Go On Make Promises

Vienna says before every performance of this song that it was written by herself and a friend, and that she was drinking tea while she wrote her verse, and Paul Freeman was drinking alcohol; whiskey or bourbon; when he wrote his. She also points out just how apt that is for the song that follows… which is HEART WRENCHING in its lyricism and its portrayal of a strained romantic entanglement.

This is a song that many people think heralds someone on the verge of breakup or divorce. The wife in frustration snarking to herself about unending laundry, an absent partner, and how he always seems to know when she’s on the verge of giving up. The guy who “comes sweeping in with his long-stemmed bloom” and allows herself to be swept off her feet, even though she’s paying the price for the fantasy. (Got my full-price ticket to your fantasy show-) 

And oh gods have I been there!!

I’ve done the legal marriage thing. I’ve done the pissed-off domestic partner thing. I’ve done the homemaker and breadwinner thing both, and sometimes at the same time and I understand that frustration on a deep level. But… I also see a male partner who, despite his shortcomings and the frustration of the daily grind, refuses to let it end like that. So perhaps, not so very on the verge as first appears.

“I see a future in spite of the past.” “If you think I’m quitting, you’re shit out of luck!” And, the thing is, it’s not scanning as “we’re going to make it work because we got married and divorce isn’t an option don’t even say it,” but more what’s in the lyrics. “We built it, WE burnt it, I’m not giving up.”
It’s so difficult to acknowledge your own part in things when it goes wrong, especially when it would be easier to blame your partner. But there he is, acknowledging it. “Hey, we didn’t do what we said we were going to, and I’m owning my part, and I don’t want to just fold and walk away.” That’s… really bittersweet and DAMNED if it doesn’t make me nearly cry every damned time I hear it!

So there he is, wandering through the city, finding some space alone to think; “From the walls of the city, to the ends of the pier”; thinking about what his partner has told him about her frustration and the arguments they’ve had; “I still hear those words of yours, ring in my ear.” AND HE COMES TO THE CONCLUSION THAT, even though they are BOTH at fault; re: communication or frustration or whatever; HE isn’t giving up so easily. 

“The deafening silence of all our mistakes, These bruised but unbroken vows” He’s fucked up, and he knows he’s fucked up, but he hasn’t broken his promises just yet. They’ve both got sidetracked, and maybe haven’t done everything they SHOULD have, but he’s still here, and willing to try harder and do better if at all possible, and won’t she please let him try?

And then they’re singing together again, and just… omg it’s hOPEFUL and yeah maybe you can’t keep EVERY promise, but you can promise to TRY right??

“There’s so many words that should make us afraid
But we still say out loud-” And then they’re encouraging each other to “go on, make promises you can’t keep-” because they’re still there, and they’re willing to make them even if they know they can’t necessarily be kept. And then she’s singing HIS lyrics

“I see a future in spite of the past-” and it’s at once reminiscing AND moving forward, even as she admits again “Got my full-price ticket to your fantasy show” while he’s standing there singing his heart out to “go on and make promises.” 

This song, man. Hits me right in the heart like a kick to the ribs every fucking time. I’ve held onto relationships I shouldn’t have and asked for promises I KNEW were going to be broken and that I’d walk away. But… I’ve also COME BACK to relationships that broke through no fault of ours; except perhaps not fighting harder for each other; and yeah. Those were some bruised vows, but not UNBROKEN ones because were still there, and still willing to pick up where we left off and build it BETTER. And that… that means so much to me.